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I'm curious, have there been any mods released that make use of the fifth-era capabilities of this editor, which Steph described in post 836?

Steph said:

However, I'm working on an "expanded" version of the game, where the rules embedded inside a save file are modified when you reach a new era.

Basically, it allows 2 main things:
- When you change an era, the settings can change. Rome, militaristic in the ancient era, can become Italy, commercial, in the medieval era. The roads can reduce movement cost by 2 in the medieval era, by 3 in industrial, and by 4 in modern times, etc.

- You can have more than 4 eras. When you reach era 4, era 1 "disappear", and era 5 is added.

I'm changing my personnal mod to this format, testing the system at the same time.

Click to expand...

As far as I could tell from reviewing the old posts - and consistently with my memory - it never quite got to the point of being advertised as ready to build with. Nonetheless, I was playing around with it a bit tonight, and the potential is there; it's a question of whether it can be done with the latest version, not whether it's theoretically possible. So I'm curious if someone did wind up releasing a mod with these capabilities, or started work on a mod with these capabilities.

For those wondering why the bump after all this time, it was the result of a blending of ideas, particularly around the excerpt, "the rules embedded inside a save file are modified". If you leave off the "when you reach a new era", it becomes a powerful concept, more so than when limited to changing eras, and that concept was the one I had been pondering. The possibilities for modding are indeed significantly expanded with that flexibility, and after ruminating on that and remembering this capability of Steph's editor, I became curious just how far this had already been pursued.

Quintillus
I do not remember the completed feature ever been released.

IIRC the trick was with saving and exporting saved game into the BIQ file via special shell:
1) player starts and plays 4-eras game as usual - but from that shell;
2) game is auto-saved on very last turn (shell);
3) last turn saved SAV converted into the BIQ (shell);
4) game auto-restarts (shell) and can be continued.

The main problem there was inherited elements, e.g. Tech Tree. If one civ advanced into "era 5" and another one is still into "era 3" then this is the show-stopper. Setting min & max times for researching a tech would fail either - Aeon mod has tech research time min = 2 & max = 4 turns and even under these conditions it's impossible to guarantee one small civ will not be tech-backward due to tech trading.

Additionally this brings necessity to develop special editor (BIQ file was turned into Steph's BIQX format to contain > 4 eras) to work with > 4 eras simultaneously. Buildings upgrades (like you need the building A to build the building B), units upgrades and other inherited stuff should be organized in correct way.

That was interesting and useful task - e.g. look at the overcrowded RaR tech tree, it could be improved by splitting into 8 eras.

Also this would help to overcome some limits:
* buildings 256 items limit: conditional - most of old buildings need to become obsolete to disappear. This can be planned ("scripted"), though;
* resources 256 items limit: same note here;
* civs 31 limit: same note here as well - some of them to be destroyed and replaced (or not) in new BIQ file.This is all about pseudo-scripting then.

SpoilerMem'ries :

This option would lead to the Rhye's mod for the Civ4 "Rhyes and Fall of Civs" IIRC.
Like when you play as Romans and captured Spain, at some point Spanish medieval units appear on the map and crush your legions (from my experience).
But playing as Japan once I overcrowded Americas with tons of knights, captured Aztecs & Maya and defended against USA due to a HUGE number of just knights.

* variations with the Space Race victory.

SpoilerAlternatives :

"Rhyes and Fall of Civs" has special victory condition for Aztecs + Mayas = build 3 (or 5) super-temples or wonders. In terms of the Civ3 = build space ship and win.

Plotinus brought alternative solution in his "Rood & Dragon" scenario = Irealnd has monks with "enslave" capability, and that "slaves" could be "sacrificed" into enormous amount of cultural points => cultural victory. So additional task for human player was to prevent Irish from achieveing this goal by conquest and removing them from Brtania island. But if he could have alternative Space Ship then (IMHO!) he'd use it.

All these conditions cannot be applied to completely random game, they'd work for specific scenarios only - and this is new & more sophisticated level of limitations.